IBM’s main announcement at IBM IMPACT is the new Websphere Cloudburst Appliance. It is happily describing its new baby as “the world’s first SOA-enabled, appliance-based cloud solution.” A semantic analysis of this description reveals it to be the world’s first buzzword-enabled, marketecture-based cloudification, but don’t worry it won’t be the last. The whole IT industry is living in cloud cuckoo land right now and it is causing dementia in otherwise sane marketing mavens – with good reason. The word from the analyst herd (and I’m part of the stampede here) is that “the cloud cuts corporate computing costs considerably”, which if it’s not true, it is at least a neat alliteration on the letter “c”.

IBM and Cloud

It’s clear, once you cut through the marketing speak, that IBM is ahead of its competition in its cloud thinking and it is now beginning to take a technology lead by rolling out cloud products to fit the thinking. The Websphere  Cloudburst Appliance is the first of several products – you’ll have to wait for the others to materialize in the coming months – and it fills a very definite need. It deploys WebSphere environments into VMware virtual machines.

So think of it like this: if you use WebSphere extensively and you use VMware for virtualization in the data center, then this appliance should interest you. It will manage the deployment and removal of virtual servers.

If you are wondering what this has to do with the cloud, then first you need to understand that IBM thinks in terms of “private clouds” as resource pools within the data center that can be utilized as on-demand resources. The reason for having a private cloud is that it is a natural staging area for external public cloud resources. If nothing else CIOs are probably not going to want to deploy applications into the cloud without first prototyping how they will work in a cloud environment.

However, some CIOs might have no cloud aspirations right now, but they probably are using virtualization for the sake of server efficiency. They should be interested in the Cloudburst Appliance anyway, because it automates the management of virtual servers which can be very labor intensive. This appliance allows you to define virtual machines that run applications that use Websphere, including all the scripts to instantiate the applications or remove them from service. You can configure specific topologies in detail and automatically roll them out. You can use it to create test environments and you could use it to schedule a whole set of WebSphere workloads that run throughout a given day or week or month.

The way that the Cloudburst Appliance works is that it sits within the network and issues virtual machine creation and configuration scripts according to direct command or to schedule. The operator access is via a secure console capability that connects through the network and it integrates directly with IBM’s Tivoli management software (if you need that). It takes minutes for it to create a new instance of a virtual machine.

This is not the end of the story by the way. Right now the Cloudburst Appliance caters only for VMware deployments, but in future releases it will almost certainly support the Xen hypervisor, Microsoft’s hypervisor and partitioning on both pSeries and zSeries hardware. Similarly this is a WebSphere appliance. We can expect other appliance products from IBM that are cloud-aware and complementary to this appliance.

Will It Sell?

IBM has not slapped a price on this product yet, so it’s difficult to come to an immediate judgmnent on whether it will sell, but the simple fact is this is a productivity device. In this market you need to deliver quick payback and this product will probably do that.

Another question is whether, strategically, you want to be taking the appliance route. My own view is that the idea of cloud computing naturally leads you to separate the service management applications from the business applications. So I don’t see an appliance approach as being incorrect. It will commit you to a specific vendor to some degree, but service management naturally takes you down that road.